Factors Affecting Research Culture at Universities in Pakistan Essay

Abstract— Research is an integral part of the higher education. Teachers and students spend weeks to find a good topic related to the field of study, data collection and analysis and finally in writing papers. Conducting research and writing papers creates a healthy activity amongst faculty and students which results in knowledge creation and emergence of research culture. Faculty at universities could be divided into two broad categories of teachers and researcher. These categories are good in their preferred field only. The challenges faced by the faculty related to research vary between private and public sectors too. However, this research shows that the leadership, curriculum, people, external environment and research experience are important factors for a research culture at universities. Keywords— research, university, higher education, leadership, faculty and inter-personal collaboration I. INTRODUCTION Research could be described as the first step in knowledge creation, which starts with search, passes through the steps of learning, teaching and ends at knowledge creation. Academia has an important role in the dissemination of knowledge to the wider society through direct and indirect interaction. A product of an individual, group or society of intelligent beings is known as culture, showing that culture is learnt through research. Therefore, the research culture can be defined as the act of knowledge creation, sharing and translated into action [1]. The term research culture is a combination of two words research and culture. The word research means â€Å"a careful or diligent search† or â€Å"the process of collecting information about a particular subject†. On the other hand the word culture could be explained as â€Å"the act ... ...ding for such activities are respected for their work as well as the funding that they attract [9]. Universities have two basic purposes of existence - teaching and research – both of which are public trust, therefore, the universities have to prove worthy of it. Universities in the developing countries are not allowed to perform independently. Furthermore universities lack resources if the government support is withdrawn. Therefore, they need to find necessary resources to be able to survive. This can be done by becoming innovative and accessible to as many as possible [11]; [12]; [13]. While studying the research culture in Caribbean universities, [14], it was mentioned that the research culture is one of the pre-requisites for a country to be able to find solutions to their problems rather than importing and adapting the knowledge created in other countries.